Ahn-ahn Mode 1.7.7 Patch (1)

"Haa... No customers again today."

The inn's proprietress wiped the staff call bell on the counter and sighed over her lot in life. Her once-radiant beauty still held firm, yet time was a current no one could reverse—fine wrinkle-scars had begun to settle in. She seemed to know all too well that her reflection in the bell and the inn itself shared the same fate, and she let out an even heavier breath.

"In our prime, this hour would have been packed wall to wall."

"Don't take it so hard, Eirin. A guest might turn up tomorrow."

"Honey. Aren't you being a little too optimistic? At this rate we won't even scrape together next month's taxes."

Hans, hauling beer kegs to help his wife, smiled gently as he tried to comfort her—but inside he felt differently. He knew as well as she did that their situation was anything but bright.

Barely twenty years ago they had lived what felt like a fairy-tale life. Hans's Inn, nestled in the Pale Forest, sat on a dangerous but invaluable shortcut between cities, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠and travelers never stopped coming. Ordinary wanderers, wealthy merchants, tax collectors, even adventurers probing the forest itself—none of them arrived with light purses, and so the couple had lived more comfortably than most. On top of that, Hans had met Eirin while she was still an adventurer, married her, and raised two daughters under their roof.

"If only that damned mage had never shown up..."

Roughly a year earlier, rumors of a suspicious mage roaming the Pale Forest had begun to circulate, and that was when their happiness started to unravel.

Hey, you hear? They found traces of that mage bastard in the Pale Forest.

A mage? The place is crawling with mages. The guy drinking himself stupid at the next table is from the Red Tower, for crying out loud.

Idiot. The Black Mage. The one who always carries those two weird black tablets.

An inn drew all sorts of people, so Hans had always kept his ear close to the ground. He already knew the stories about the Black Mage by heart.

If you ever see the mage with one small black tablet in his hand and a bigger one tucked under his arm—run. Once he starts spouting words no one can understand, it's already too late.

The small tablet blazed like midday sun and the person turned stiff as stone. Then the mage opened the big tablet under his arm and hammered at the floating thing with his fingers.

Whoever got hit by the magic became something else entirely—a whore or a monster, or something beyond definition, stripped of every scrap of morality and moved only by instinct, by pure lust. When the small tablet flashed again... that thing became the mage's slave.

"And the day after the magic went off, parchment rained from the sky. At the very top it said: Ahn-ahn Mode Patch Notes."

Hans muttered the old rumor without thinking and glanced up at the family portrait hanging on the inn wall. In ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the photograph his two daughters—faces he would never see again—stood arm in arm, beaming.

Even now he could hear their voices as if they were standing right beside him.

Dad, we're gonna pick some cranberries in the forest!

The Black Mage? Come on. That's just a fairy tale they made up to scare kids.

The two girls who had gone deep into the woods for cranberries never came home. The only thing that returned was a single sheet of parchment.

The rumored parchment that had fallen from the sky. Words he could read but never truly understand. One fact, however, was crystal clear: Ray and Arca—his own daughters—had been turned into something else by that mage and would never come back.

He had not simply sat idle. Day after day he plastered missing posters through every corner of the forest, along the roads to the cities, even inside the cities themselves. No word ever returned. If anything, the posters only confirmed the rumor that the Black Mage still prowled somewhere in the Pale Forest. Traffic into the woods dried up overnight, and Hans, already robbed of his daughters, now faced the prospect of shutting down the inn that held every memory of them.

"Honey, I'm going up to bed first."

"All right. I'll finish cleaning and watch the counter another hour..."

"Aren't you exhausted? You've been handing out flyers inside the walls since morning. And it's obvious no one's coming tonight."

"Still."

Eirin climbed the stairs with a gloomy face. She used to smile and say good night every evening; he missed that smile, but he knew she needed more time, so he only exhaled a low sigh.

An hour later Hans stood behind the counter with a mug of beer, staring endlessly at the missing posters tacked to the wall.

And then—

"Damn it, why is this forest so ridiculously complicated and finicky?"

A loud, complaining voice carried in from outside.

"A customer?"

Anyone making that much noise this late at night had to be a guest. It had been so long that Hans spilled beer across the counter without noticing as he hurried to the window.

Outside stood a man. A decent-looking sword hung at his hip, and his plate armor was neither crude nor particularly fine.

A greenhorn adventurer? He's talking into a crystal, so he's not just some knight transfer. Magic warrior type, maybe?

The man's conversation was painfully loud—loud enough to worry Hans, given how many sound-sensitive monsters lived in the forest. But what did it matter? Just having a customer again was enough to make him glad.

"Ugh... Don't even get me started. I made the patterns for the new Mate-Seeking Wolf Sisters Ray and Arca way too bullshit. Tons of bugs, too. The gallery's going nuts demanding bugfixes and nerfs."

"Did I test it? Just ran about ten raid tests. It's pretty rough, yeah. Numbers nerf should be enough, though. Cut the sisters' combo heal by two-thirds and drop the male wolf-beastkin summoned by Call Mating Partner from four to three. That'll do it."

"Bugs? A bunch popped this time. When one of them peels off for female pre-heat, the other is supposed to return, but sometimes she doesn't. And if they both use Climax Squat at the same time, the mating stance never breaks and power stacks infinitely."

The man's monologue, and the look in Hans's eyes as he listened—those eyes held nothing but confusion and terror. He could not even begin to grasp what the stranger was talking about. Patterns? Bugs? Nerfs? The alien jargon bored straight into his ears. Yet one thing rang out with perfect clarity.

Ray and Arca.

The names of his missing daughters.

In a flash the Black Mage rose in his mind—the being who spouted incomprehensible words and turned people into subhuman whores.

I should lock the door at least...

Unfortunately, in that brief moment the man yanked the inn door ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠open and strode inside. His tall frame and ordinary, unremarkable face—hidden by the dark until now—came fully into view.

"Ah—welcome. This is Hans's Inn..."

Hans forced a calm greeting on pure reflex, but the man kept muttering nonsense into his call and never answered.

"Still, the clear rewards weren't half bad, right? The unique weapons and skill scrolls drop all the way into late game, and if you clear the hidden quest you can even take both sisters as pets."

"Don't worry, I'm patching a little more this time. I'll scatter permanent transformation potions and intelligence-down potions so you can use them as mounts. Pets that transform into any beastkin you want—sick, right?"

"And I'm adding interactions with the new final boss in this update. If you challenge the final boss without killing Ray and Arca, they show up as enemies too. Bring them as pets and you get extra patterns. How's that sound?"

"Final boss concept? Hmm... spoilers. For now, the setting is that she's the mother who gave birth to Ray and Arca."

The man rattled off a few more unintelligible lines, then ended the call. He looked at Hans, smiled brightly, and asked:

"Would you happen to be the owner of this inn?"

"Yes... th-that's right. Are you alone?"

"Well, for the moment it looks that way. My party should show up soon. About... three of them?"

"Of them...?"

"They're closer to beasts than humans. Beastkin-type monsters. Ah—first, one beer, and one roast chicken. The setting is that the innkeeper's wife here makes excellent roast chicken, so I was curious."

"My wife's already asleep, so the chicken might be a bit..."

The man shook his head in mild disappointment and settled for just the beer. Then he produced from his coat a small rectangular black tablet and a much larger one, setting both on the table. The larger tablet opened like a book, but its structure was nothing like the small one: one panel stood upright while the other lay flat for support. Across the lower panel ran a neat row of square tiles stamped with letters.

It did not take Hans long to realize these were the two mysterious stone tablets the Black Mage was said to carry.

"Wondering what these are? This little one is a smartphone, and this—what I'm typing on right now—is a laptop."

"Smartphone? Laptop? What kind of tools are those?"

"Just think of them as programming tools for making smut mods. Or, to be more precise..."

None of it registered. Reading scripture to a cow would not make the cow understand; Hans had no idea how to respond. The man chattered on happily by himself, then drained the beer in one go when he finished talking. He wiped the foam from his chin with a finger, spotted something on the far wall, and shook his head hard in pure disgust. The beer-wet fingertip pointed straight at the missing posters of Ray and Arca.

"That's the problem. Those damn missing posters."

"The missing posters? Th-those are of my daughters..."

"Yeah, yeah, I know. You plastered so many of those useless missing posters that load times got longer and frame drops got worse. Stuff like that should only go up once or twice for event flavor. Thanks to you I got roasted alive by the gallery."

"Wh-what!"

"Don't worry. I'll fix it in this patch. The posters will only go on the guild request board—one or two copies—plus one in this inn, and a couple of torn ones in Ray and Arca's boss room. That's it."

"What the hell is this son of a bitch talking about!"

A scream tore from Hans's throat. Whether the man in front of him was the Black Mage or not no longer mattered. The casual dismissal of his daughters' disappearance, the mockery of every effort he had made to find them—Hans clenched the beer mug as if he meant to cave the stranger's skull in on the spot. If Eirin, woken by the noise, had not thrown open the door and stopped him, the man's head would already have been dented.

"Who the hell are you! Barging into someone else's inn and pulling this—what are you even doing here! And what are all those nonsense words!"

"Around here they call me Luke. Real name's Kim Jinwoo. On the gallery I go by IrisPussyTasteCookie. And why am I here? To patch, of course."

"Honey, calm down. And—Luke? Kim Jinwoo? IrisPussyTasteCookie? Why so many bizarre names? And what exactly is this 'patch'—"

"Simple, ma'am. Or should I already be calling you the Pack Mother, soon-to-be final boss of this forest? Anyway, a patch means fixing something."

"Fixing...?"

"Exactly. Correcting errors, balancing things that are too strong or too weak, or adding new content. That's the term."

Hans only bristled further, still unable to follow.

"In short, my job is to tear apart and rewrite the NPCs of this other world—meaning you people. After I built Ahn-ahn Mode I left the Pale Forest alone for a while, so it lost all its appeal. No H-scenes, no H-events, experience and item drops both garbage. So I'm going to rip up the local ecology, environment, monsters, and the residents—you—and turn it into brand-new boss content for the players."

"Tear us... apart and rewrite us? Why?"

"Like I said... because it doesn't get me hard. Plus the game is so high-spec that modding existing NPC files is way more efficient than dropping in brand-new assets. And the new storyline is hot as hell on top of that. Same goes for your daughters, Eirin."

"What...? Y-you did something to our girls..."

"They were popular, high-demand characters, so I put some real work into recycling them. Players loved it—I was satisfied. Even if all the bugs they kept throwing made my life hell."

Crash!

A violent impact rang through the inn. Hans hurled the shattered beer mug aside, seized Luke by the collar, and roared.

"What did you do to our daughters—to Ray and Arca! Where are they! Where the hell are they!"

Luke's voice stayed leisurely, as if he had been through this countless times and it meant nothing at all.

"Beats me? I don't really know where your daughters are in the other worlds. Somewhere they might already have been subjugated and are getting railed by a new master; somewhere else they might be shaking their hips and mating with wild wolves."

"Wh-what?"

"Relax for now. In this world, the twentieth Ray and Arca have already been tamed as my pets. Ray's still clumsy—needs more technique training—but Arca's smart, so her learning curve is steep. She's already pretty good at fellatio."

"Talk so I can understand you!"

No matter how hard Hans shook him or how tightly he choked, Luke remained unfazed. He even clicked his tongue as if he were getting tired.

"Honestly. No matter how hard I try explaining to NPCs, they never get it. Fun little comedy routine, but let's wrap it up. I need the final boss ready today so I can test and ship in a week—so no more detailed explanations. Time to work."

Click!

A sharp pop and a flash of light. The sound Hans and Eirin could not name—but which others called a camera shutter—echoed through the room. Its source was the smartphone in Luke's hand, the small black tablet they had called a stone slate.

And Eirin froze.

Literally, stiff as a board.

Eyes locked forward without focus, body rigid as a mannequin, face utterly blank of emotion. Like a corpse—no warmth, no capacity to move. Hans was the same. Unlike his wife he kept his consciousness and reason intact, yet he could not so much as twitch a finger.

"You bastard! My wife! What did you do to my Eirin!"

"I told you I'm patching. Once I finish Eirin safely I'll do you right after, so just wait."

Free of Hans's grip, Luke roughly groped Eirin's ample breasts, then sat down at the table.

"Let's see... Eirin's definition file... Ah, here it is."

Five simple clicks.

A translucent window bloomed beside the rigid woman. Not only trivial data like name, sex, and occupation, but quite literally everything that made up Eirin, laid out in rows before their eyes.

"Ugh... Spaghetti code. Early-game character, huh? This is gonna be a pain to edit."

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

"If you so much as touch a single hair on my wife I will—"

"Before we start... wipe the name and assign [NPC Temporary Code: BitchCunt No. 13672]."

The soft chime rang. The name "Eirin" on the status window slowly erased itself and the newly assigned [NPC Temporary Code: BitchCunt No. 13672] took its place.

"...Play voice file [Inn Entry]. Play action file [Cunt Squat]. Play expression [Joy]. And output dialogue [Inn Entry]."

And then—

"Welcome. This is Hans and [NPC Temporary Code: BitchCunt No. 13672]'s Inn. I am the proprietress of this place, [NPC Temporary Code: BitchCunt No. 13672]."

The blank-faced, rigidly frozen Eirin began to move. She laced her arms behind her head so her armpits were fully exposed, then squatted with her thighs spread wide open like a street whore.

With the happiest expression in the world she introduced herself by her new name—[NPC Temporary Code: BitchCunt No. 13672]—in the same gentle, soft voice Hans had known for a lifetime.